Wine teller ventures into world of sommeliers

Some people shuffle paper for their jobs. Some sommeliers lick rocks, if they’re desperate enough to want to know the difference between the taste of blue slate and red. They forgo brushing their teeth in the morning, drinking hot beverages or using perfume and extra salt.

Their palates — and their noses — are their instruments. Who would risk blistering or blunting them?

Bianca Bosker’s “Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste” is a thrilling journey into this sometimes-disgusting universe.

Bosker was the technology editor of The Huffington Post when she heard about the World’s Best ■ “Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste” (Penguin Books, 329 pages, $17) by Bianca Bosker

Sommelier Competition. She binge-watched videos. She marveled. She decided to change her life. For 18 months, she shadowed wine fanatics, hoping to become a certified sommelier herself.

She calls sommeliers “the most masochistic hedonists I’d ever met.” They spend evenings on their feet. During the day, they practice the arcane rituals of wine service, ingest a magnum of wine esoterica and, if they’re aspiring to become master sommeliers, sample more than 20,000 kinds of wine so that they can make such blind declarations as: “This is a Merlot-dominant blend from the right bank of Bordeaux from the village of Saint-Émilion in the 2010 vintage of Grand Cru Classe quality.”

That’s a direct quote. It comes from Bosker’s friend and guide Morgan Harris, a brassily opinionated sommelier in New York.

Bosker herself is possessed of a jolly hubris that helps her bluff her way into jobs for which she isn’t remotely qualified as well as muscle her way into the most elite blind-tasting group in Manhattan. It would be like me deciding I wanted to brush up on my baseball skills by joining the Yankees for spring training.

She gets a quick, boozy education, and so do we.

I’d say Harris deserves his own TV show, but in a sense, he already has one, as do some of the other somms Bosker follows. They’re on the Esquire Network’s “Uncorked.” It felt dishonest of her not to say so.

And I grew similarly queasy with how she would congratulate herself for sweet-talking her way into an event she had no business attending. Did she promise the organizers publicity in her book? A magazine article? Too often, she doesn’t say.

But she is, in the main, great company as a narrator — witty, generous, democratic. Eventually, she interrogates the entire notion of wine expertise, which in turn raises the biggest question of all: What

make a wine great?